Here's hoping he can help get Enduro where I want it to be. Sean seemed to be pretty heavily involved in helping NVIDIA focus on the right problems with Optimus, so Enduro would be a great task for him (managing, not coding, obviously).Reply

Looks like Enduro (or AMD?) is such a lost cause he went running back to nVidia as fast as he could after the tour of the (leased) HQ.

"What's the deal with the people?" he asked as they rounded it up.

"Oh? Yeah, today's a busy day. We got all hands on deck to really show you our strength..."

"Wait. This is it? At nVidia, this is a team dedicated to something like Shield. This is all the people you have?"

"We had layoffs. I mean, we got three or so people here and we gave 'em big photos to cover their door with, but single hires only go so far to make up for all the people we had to lay off..."

"Yeah, dude. You know what? I forgot something in my car. Man. I'm so sorry. Is this an exit? It is? Oh, great! I'll be right back. I swear. I just... uhm, I forgot my... insulin shot."

"You're diabetic?"

"Weeell, no, not really, but hey I always... uh... carry it around just in case I become that way. Yeah. You wait here. I'll be... uh, right back."

Raja waits. He looks around. He hears rapid footsteps. A car door open. It shuts. Then the car starts up and the engine roars as wheels squeal. The car crashes through the gate and Raja sighs. He walks up to the nearest window and watches the dust cloud from the car's track settle slowly back to the Earth.

"Did he bolt, too?" One of the few non-name people walks up behind him. "I had high hopes he wouldn't..."

"Yeah. Seems like once they always do that. What is it about us that makes them do that? That's the fifth gate this week!"Reply

That is great news. AMD is in dire need excactly at that spot. There seems to be lot of opportunities here :)- explaining, dialogue and developing relations is also good for tech development in the long run. So congrats to us.Reply

My interpretation of the graphs is that the new Haswell is dangerously close to going head to head with AMD's best on IGP. It would be beneficial to know what the two bars per item represent. I would guess turbo and no turbo. I don't read Chinese. Anyway, what is not there is the Haswell part is 84W TDP and AMD's is 100W. In all likelihood the Intel chip will run cooler. AMD will still hold the driver software advantage.Reply

Richland is just a revision of Trinity and nothing else changes on clock-speed and how they do Turbo as they has added a sensor. It's exactly the same performance as before per MHz. Those 20-40% is just between two sets of two different SKU's that is clocked very differently in the 40% case.Reply

While this is true for Richland being 65w part, the preliminary benchmarks actually showed between 15%-25% improvement over the existing Trinity chips. Just to average up tp 20% would be a significant improvement over the Intel part considering it is a top-end part at high cost. This actually means the AMD Richland part costing between 1/2 to half the price of the Intel part is a great deal for many. For many games, the frame-rates are more than enough on the APU.Reply

Um...no cause I still buy a dedicated GPU anyway. So until they have actual useful CPU performance on par with intel but cheaper or higher performing, then I don't even care what they do. Maybe I'll buy their graphics cards but that's cause their GPU side actually remains competitive at the task it is meant for. I am never going to buy a CPU because it has a GPU that can play 30fps at 1280x720. Give me a break.Reply

AMD didn't crush even when Intel when Athlon 64's were hands down the better CPUs in all regards (and that situation lasted for quite a while). Intel was still selling times more than AMD, even though it's CPUs were:1) Slower2) Consumed more power3) AND WHERE MORE EXPENSIVE (tadaa)

So I'm not quite sure which virtual fanbois you are refering too.Reply

I'd consider buying an AMD GPU card if I knew they were serious about supporting linux, which is what I run on my laptop and desktop computers 97% of the time they are powered on*. No amount of slick marketing is going to persuade me to buy AMD/ATI over NVidia or Intel, because no matter how good the benchmarks might look, a card that turns into a brick after upgrading my OS and the drivers failing and there being no updates, is a waste of money.

* windows is booted very rarely, for special utilities that aren't on linux. last time was yesterday for ODIN to reflash a Samsung phone. Reply

HD 7970M is about 300MHash/s so I wouldn't really think that's a viable way to go, except to supplement hashing power. You're far better off just buying inexpensive desktop GPUs, or FPGAs (or if you can find one for sale, ASICs).Reply

AMD's drivers are not open source. AMD just provided some documentation and let the open source community hack at it to make the graphics card come to life. There are two drivers a Linux user can use. One is fglrx which is a closed-source driver written by AMD. The other is radeon that created by the open source community and Xorg. Using the radeon driver in Linux has some support for 3D, so using AMD graphics for playing games on STEAM will be 50% chance of working and 50% of not working. Using fglrx driver may work often in STEAM, but it may also crash more often than the radeon driver.Reply

Wrong. AMD employees do significant work on the FOSS AMD drivers. Radeon does well on many Steam games (R600g and R300g both perform near their proprietary counterparts). 50% is skewed incorrectly -- games will work 90% on Steam games with FOSS. Framerates may not be quite sufficient but that isn't "not working."

Proprietary drivers are buggy, but they are compliant *cough* Nvidia *cough*.Reply

Both AMD and Nvidia open source drivers suck terribly. They have piss poor perf and usually cant downclock/upclock .The only difference is AMD provides support for developing these opensource drivers, while Nvidia provides absolutely no support whatsoever.Reply

I understand your viewpoint, but surely they must be planning to keep linux support, for what it is, up to date.

Heck, they released the strings for Hainan to the open-source stack and we still have no idea when that will be actual products..the official driver still refers to it as the vague 'R503' last time I checked. While one can absolutely argue gpu performance and feature disparity in Linux (across all brands, not just AMD), I fail to see how their cards will brick with an update. Support, again for what it is, seems to be consistent if not proactive.Reply

First, why not giant-sized image of the man's face? I mean, the fanboy article about Raja was like an obituary on the man's every accomplishment, his awesomeness, the fact that he enjoyed long walks on the beach, etc.

This one seems rather brief. Shouldn't Sean get equal amounts of fanboyism? He is... Sean Pelletier after all. This is Sean Pelletier we're talking about here!

Haha, anyways, the thing that amuses me about this is how the article ignores the very real possibility that AMD could hire all these people for the short term gain of hiring a single high profile individual to convince investors of a company's longterm viability. Certainly, getting rid of teams of engineers, marketeters, etc while hiring four people seems like they're NOT equal in terms of how much it helps or hurts a company.

But hiring high profile names that are years away from any meaningful difference in the company's day to day and by every account they don't have years... well, that suggests to me they're hiring people to prop their reputation up in the hopes of investment... or buyout.

And one of those two happens (or bankruptcy), these guys are free to leave with a lot more money and join Qualcomm.Reply

Actually, for what Sean does, his presence in the company could be felt much, *much* more immediately, and essentially solves a serious problem that AMD has had for years. Understand that he's been one of our primary contacts over at NVIDIA for a long time and has been able to answer product questions and get us help extremely quickly. This isn't something we've (or at least I've) had as readily available from AMD.

So while the end user may not immediately feel the difference, the press absolutely will.Reply

I doubt that these guys would be jumping aboard a sinking ship!If you had a healthy choice of successful companies to sign up to, would you pick one that was sick and dying with the chance it would infect your career?

I do hope AMD turn around their CPU division (not APUs as they're fine, I mean high performance, halo CPUs). I've also had a soft spot for them and I've put them in all the SoHo Linux servers I've built and they've been rock solid. Just finished first mITX/APU server 30 mins ago.Reply

I think you might be on to something. I agree they are certainly not joining a sinking ship but on the contrary, might be shown a golden ship with the proposed new architecture that they are trying with Xbox720 and PS4. That huma tech which if done in totality for the discrete card market and even on their APU will be "leaps and bounds" compared to the competition. Here are the benchmarks, Intel's IGP used to be 1/3 the speed of AMD. Now it is getting to 90% of AMD's speed. So AMD needed a 3X leap-frog to stay competitively ahead. You cannot get such improvements without dramatic architectural changes, so they found a golden goose somewhere and convinced their people it is so. We shall see ..Reply

I don't know about other states, but California's pretty anti-"anti-competition" clauses. There may not be a whole hell of a lot NVIDIA can really do. I can't imagine they're remotely happy about this, though.Reply

The Dream Team will have to find a vision for AMD and solutions really fast.AMD is financially super weak, it's product pipeline isn't exciting and I highly doubt their foray into ARM will save them as I see very little value-added here in comparison to Qualcomm and others.Reply